TWIN PEAKS: How David Lynch Kept The Show’s Revival A Secret All These Years

“Diane, 11:30 a.m., February Twenty-fourth. Entering the town of Twin Peaks, five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line. I’ve never seen so many trees in my life.” Agent Cooper was the guy who couldn’t really see the forest for the trees, just like Kyle MacLachlan and the rest of the Twin Peaks crew didn’t see the revival of the show coming.

David Lynch, however – did. Naturally.

The show’s creator has been notoriously and almost connivingly (why isn’t this a word yet?) keeping all the information about the “Twin Peaks” revival so closely under wraps that even Mark Frost, the co-writer, was being kept in the dark.

Naomi Watts once said that shooting with Lynch is “a game of guessing and torture, but in a sort of pleasant way, and then not knowing becomes part of the fun.” Well, that’s Lynch for ya.

In a recent interview, he gave away why and how he managed to ever-so-fanatically keep all the details about the Twin Peaks resuscitation project a secret.

Keep Everyone In The Dark, Even The Cast

Yes, Lynch didn’t even tell the cast that the show is being rebooted. Almost the entire returning cast had no clue about the “Twin Peaks” revival. They read about it in the news, actually. Then they emailed Lynch, only to get this response:

“I’ll be seeing you very soon in the beautiful world of Twin Peaks.” One mysterious dude, indeed.

Even once the shooting started, he only gave the actors what they needed to know about the particular upcoming scene, and nothing else. “There isn’t really a need to have everybody read the whole script,” Lynch explained. “So they get their scenes. And when we work together, they ask many questions, and they get answers.”

Also, the scripts had numerous pages blacked out so that actors couldn’t read the scenes they didn’t need to know about.

Robert Forster, a new cast member, described it like this: “You know that the artist is putting your color into that creation for a reason. You don’t know the reason, as the dot of red paint does not know why it is in a painting. But David Lynch knows why it’s there.”

Leave No Room For Error

In an attempt to hide all the new plot twists and the highly anticipated unraveling of this now-decades-old story, Lynch never sent his scripts digitally. Instead, he made sure the show hand-delivered hard copies of scripts to the actors.

During the shooting days Lynch wanted to keep the actors on standby, meaning they would only be given the exact filming locations on the very day of filming so they wouldn’t accidentally give away the locations in the interviews.

Lynch is even keeping his writing partner in the dark: “I haven’t seen the finished product yet,” Mark Frost admitted. “David’s still working.”